Motivational Quotes

Art

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

- Mailer, Norman

Best Quotes about Art

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

10.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

11.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

12.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

13.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

14.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

16.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

17.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

18.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

19.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

20.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

21.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

22.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

24.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

25.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

26.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

27.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

28.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

29.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

30.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

31.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

34.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

35.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

36.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

38.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

39.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

40.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

41.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

42.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

43.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

46.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

47.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

48.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

49.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.